


A Night at the Palais

by jat_sapphire



Category: The Professionals
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 03:57:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19165345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jat_sapphire/pseuds/jat_sapphire
Summary: Bodie and Doyle stake out a dance hall.  Doyle dances.This was the first Professionals story I wrote.  It was in the 2018 BistoCon zine.





	A Night at the Palais

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Cyanne, who made the half-a-case-plot make some sense.

Ray Doyle was dancing. 

While the backbeat thrummed up his legs, the wall of sound matching the wall of flashing bulbs at the back of the dance floor, he twisted his hips and lifted his arms. There was hardly room to move his feet without bumping into someone, and nobody near him was appetizing enough for that. His Qiana shirt slid over the sweat on his back and snagged on his ribs. His hair stuck to his forehead, tangled wetly in his necklace. He missed his shoulder holster. 

The disco ball and coloured spotlights made him feel they were all dancing in a boiling snow-globe, flakes of black, white, and liquorice-allsorts colours making faces shift and melt. As an obbo, this had seemed a better idea than it was turning out to actually be. He could see forms moving amongst the tables but would have been hard-pressed to identify anyone in court. 

Maybe Bodie was doing better. He had the table nearest the bead curtain, where people came in from the car park and went out to the bogs and came back. Lots of traffic, and a bare bulb near the ceiling.

Ray turned and pretended to dance with the nearest bird, who was shaking her long hair back and forth, completely absorbed in her own movement. Past her, he looked over at the beads swaying and rippling, and there was his partner, looking in entirely the wrong direction. 

At Ray. 

What was the great berk doing? Even if the obbo were a waste of time, not actually observing was hardly going to shorten the time Cowley kept them assigned there. 

Ray stepped around the hair-waving girl, then around a man not so much dancing as staggering vaguely back and forth, then around a couple trying to slow-dance, until he reached the edge of the hardwood and stalked over the carpet to Bodie’s table. 

\------------------------------------ 

Bodie had been slouched a little in the flimsy chair, but when he saw the wrath of God descending, he sat up and began to feel aggrieved. It had only been a minute he'd been watching, and anyway what the hell did Doyle think? His hair, even bushier than usual, had waved in the moving lights like a regular halo, and his shirt glowed and framed his sweat-sparkled chest, and when his arms curved up and Bodie knew very well how his arse was moving in the tight clasp of that moleskin… well, really, what else could he possibly look at? Even now? The muscles in his thighs alone were mesmerizing, even though Bodie saw them up and down stairs, in and out of the car, every bloody day. 

When Doyle stopped beside the table, the door-light gilded his hair and shoulders but left his downturned expression a mystery. His mouth was set hard. Not bothering to protest, Bodie awaited one of Ray’s famed sarky take-downs. 

But Doyle didn’t even speak for what seemed a long time, until his hand settled on Bodie’s arm in a grip like a vice, hauled him to his feet and tugged him back out to the dance floor. 

Bodie could have struggled. Heavier, taller, he knew that in a real fight… but this wasn’t a fight. So he let himself be turned the way they’d come and stayed put when Doyle stepped back and began to dance again, between Bodie and the door, then leaned in and said under the bump and roar of the music, “Move. I know you’re not much of a dancer, but at least you can be staring in the right direction.” 

Still not dancing, Bodie also leaned in. “You might’ve asked.” 

“Never use ingenuity—“ 

“When brute force will suffice? Ooh, you brute.” 

Doyle’s anger seemed to shatter under the broken light, and he half-smiled, a glint of teeth. “You do need to save your brain cells.” He looked over Bodie’s shoulder and gave himself to the music again. 

He had a point, Bodie conceded. They’d be stuck here forever if they’d nothing to report. So he bent his knees a bit and moved his feet, convinced as usual when he danced alone that he looked a prat. 

As he watched, Doyle smiled more widely. “There, not so hard, is it?” 

Bodie's eyes flicked down without his conscious permission. “Well, as to that...” 

Laughing, Doyle thrust out his hips, all the lines of his face falling into abrupt beauty and the sound shaking Bodie's joints more than the backbeat. It forced his own body into an easier, swinging step, the way he danced with a bird he fancied. Doyle drifted a little to one side to scan for anyone new at the tables, and Bodie tried to make his own surveillance of the door look like the absent expression of someone without a partner. A dance partner. 

He wished it were the kind of club where he could have danced with Doyle. 

That would be a different assignment altogether. The contraband traders Cowley was after would never meet in a place the plods were always checking for underage and public indecency. Still, it looked as though they weren't interested in meeting here either, despite what Jax’s grass had hinted to him. 

The lights and vibrations and shifting crowd created a dreamlike, even hallucinatory effect. Bodie drifted. Doyle danced. No suspicious characters appeared. 

\------------------------------------  


Ray had once spent his nights off going club to club, before CI5, pulling birds and trying to reach this trancelike, lazy fusion of body and music. 

Sliding his gaze Bodie-ward, Ray smirked. Too bad there was no mirror here. He would have loved to take the piss and point out how swirling rainbow fires made his partner's simple cream jacket and the wide black wings of his black shirt collar into a peacock display. 

But that might have brought back Bodie's self-consciousness, which would have been a pity. Now he had his grace back, the powerful, smooth movement that at work made deadly force look like dancing. Now dancing looked lethal, at least to Ray's ability to see if Golov or one of his henchmen came in. 

Another scan of the tables was clearly needed. Maybe from another spot on the dance floor. 

Yet he didn't move away. 

Without looking, Ray knew how the fabric of that jacket creased over the muscles of Bodie's arms, how the tails moved back and forth over his thighs. A bit John Travolta, though Bodie wouldn't be caught dead pointing at the ceiling. And instead of all that chest hair (Ray touched his own chest, remembering the poster), the hollow at the base of Bodie's throat drew the eye, at least the mind's eye. Ray's mind's eye. It wasn't really possible, was it, for Ray to hear the small clicks and shuffles of Bodie's boots on the floor? Not over all that loud music? But he felt he could. 

His own feet kept the same rhythm—his shoulders, his hips. The part of his consciousness that was not searching the crowd, was not absorbed in the music, flashed images of Bodie running upstairs, diving through a kicked-open door, struggling to fit his shoulders through a narrow window or heaving himself over the top of a wall. 

Their eyes met, and they smiled. 

A vaguely familiar figure walked between them, crossing among the dancers. It was the body language—stiff, military, blockish—like a Russian ambassador or functionary. The man made his way to the tables. 

Before the two agents could react, the song changed. Ray stepped a little longer with the slower beat, and he came down on the top of someone's buckled shoe. As he staggered, wrongfooted, a hand like the bumper of a lorry shoved at his shoulder and a voice revved like a bike engine: “Watch y'self, ya bloody poof!” 

Turning, Ray looked up, looked farther up. How had he missed this brontosaurus on the dance floor, or even coming in? Ray was reminded of Tinkerbell the bodyguard, except that this bloke was even bigger. And something else about the battered face reminded him—wasn't this the one in Jax's file, the one he was going to follow tonight?—Ray glanced at Bodie, but just then the big man grabbed Ray's collarbone and pressed in. 

No need for speech or signals. Ray bent his knees, dragging the behemoth's arm down with him, getting his own grip on the massive wrist. Bodie swung a roundhouse kick at the head but hit the barrel neck instead, and when the man reached for his foot, drew it back and lashed out straight, this time hitting just on the Adam's apple. Ray hooked the nearer of his attacker's legs and he went down like a felled tree. A few seconds, no more. Only the nearest dancers even noticed shadows struggling in the kaleidoscope dark. 

The partners shared another glance as Ray got to his feet. They weren’t even breathing hard. Out of nowhere, Jax was bending over the lout, checking his pulse, and then he grinned. “All according to Hoyle. Or Doyle,” he said, and closed the handcuffs, clack and clack. As he stood, he gave Bodie and Ray a quick once-over. “And they say white men can't dance.” 

“Does he work for—” Ray began, then spun to see the Russian making his hurried way to the curtained door. “Bodie!” 

They shoved past dancers, ran out into the car park, and caught their target as he pulled out his keys. Evidently the dinosaur was his only bodyguard. A red bonnet moved up beside them and Cowley lowered the window to say, “What took you lads so long? It's half the night gone. Ah, bring him in and we'll get started with the interrogation.” 

\------------------------------------ 

Many hours later, the partners paused just outside the front entrance of CI5's headquarters. Doyle tilted his head back and squinted at the sun. “What's that doing there?” he asked. 

“Giving me a headache,” said Bodie, for lack of anything cleverer. 

“Come to mine and have a cuppa.” 

Bodie smiled. “Wi' a dram,” he said in the Scots accent he knew was awful. 

Moving easily (and how he could after that long night), Doyle said over his shoulder, “With anything I’ve got in.” 

Were those sparkles of coloured light? Was Bodie’s vision just betraying him, or was Doyle dancing down the steps? “I’ll hold you to that,” was all he could say. 

On the pavement, Doyle turned, the wide, real smile he rarely used on his face, and said, “Hold me to anything you like.” 

Dazed with the possibilities (Wall? Door? Shower tiles? Bed?), Bodie danced stair by stair to meet him.


End file.
